Donald Trump

At a time when disinformation and fake news corrupt communication channels, delivering the truthful and authentic American message is needed now more than ever. American public diplomacy, our nation’s outreach to peoples around the world, is the prime channel for communicating this message. It is essential to this country’s national security and should be vigorously championed by the president and Congress.

It was only a few years ago that e-diplomacy was being heralded as an unalloyed force for good. This 21st Century form of statecraft would bring transparency and openness to the closeted world of international affairs...U.S. President Donald Trump has obviously highlighted the dangers of conducting foreign policy by social media. In the hands of the impulsive and uniformed, the smart phone becomes a dangerous weapon.

Natural disasters know no political boundaries. And that’s why international humanitarian relief flows so quickly, and in such great and humbling quantities, when hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis strike. But today, with Houston suffering as Mother Nature’s latest victim, will the world’s giving nations step-up and step-in to help American relief efforts?

Information campaigning in various forms is as old as politics itself, and nor is it the sole province of political bogeymen. Research shows that democracies are better than autocracies at influencing foreign public opinion, and businesses, politicians and states all use the mass media strategically for their information campaigns. The names we give a particular information campaign not only reflect our inferences about its aims; they can in fact amplify its power and advance its goals.

The committee, devised in 1982 under the Ronald Reagan administration, was initially created to advise the White House on cultural issues. However, that mission has become extraordinarily difficult under the Trump administration, Penn tells Vanity Fair.

Apple, LinkedIn, Spotify and Twitter have joined a growing chorus of technology companies to hit out at the far right and Donald Trump's attempt to put white supremacists and leftwing counter-demonstrators at Saturday’s Charlottesville protest on the same moral plane. [...] Apple also pledged to match two-for-one employee donations to human rights groups until 30 September, and said it would roll out donation systems for the SPLC through its iTunes store.

America does not have a regional problem, it has a national one. It is less about which statues stay up in the South than which prejudices fall nationwide. And that will, in turn, determine how we deserve to be seen in the world.